Ave Marcella

Near the beginning of Marcella's Italian Cooking there's a section titled: The Taste of Italian Cooking: Elementary Rules. And then there's one page of short, direct, axiomatic principles. Many of them I will never follow. But I love reading them, knowing what they are, wishing to follow them and relishing the few that describe what I'm already doing anyway, such as: "Do not clarify butter" or "Do not esteem so-called fresh pasta more than the dry, factory made variety." There's something bracing about all that natural authority fit onto one page. It's like The Elements of Style, the United States Constitution or the Decalogue--brevity and authority in close relationship.

Anyway, here they are:

• Use no Parmesan that is not parmigiano-reggiano. (See the discussion of parmigiano-reggiano on page 11.)
• Never buy grated cheese of any kind; grate cheese fresh when ready to use it.
• With exceedingly rare exceptions, do not add grated Parmesan to pasta whose sauce has been cooked with olive oil.
• Use only extra virgin olive oil (Please see Olive Oil on page 7-10.)
• Dress salads with no other oil but olive
• Do not use prepared salad dressings, even if prepared at home. Mix the condiments into the salad when you are tossing it. Toss salads just before serving.
• Use herbs and spices sparingly. Think of them as a halo, not a club.
• Do not confuse stock with meat broth. Meat broth ( 73) is what goes into Italian cooking.
• When ripe, fresh tomatoes are in season, do not use the canned. (Out of season, see the recommendation on page 12-13.)
• Abstain from using frozen vegetables, except for frozen leaf spinach, which can be substituted for fresh in making green pasta.
• Do not overcook pasta
• Do not precook pasta
• Do not esteem so-called fresh pasta more than the dry, factory-made variety. (Please see discussion of homemade and factory-made pasta on pages 90-6)
• Match the sauce to the pasta, taking into account the shape and texture of pasta.
• Do not buy prepared pasta salads, pre-cooked or frozen pasta, or stuffed pasta.
• Do not turn heavy cream into a warm bath for pasta or for anything else. Reduce it, reduce it, reduce it.
• Vegetables and beans are, on occasion, passed through a food mill. Do not process them to a cream. It Italian cooking there is no cream of anything soup.
• Do not serve fowl rare. Italian birds are cooked through and through.
• Do not clarify butter. (See Cooking with Butter at High Temperature, page 16.)
• When making risotto, use only Italian varieties grown for that purpose. (Please see Risotto, pages 153-5.)
• Find a butcher who will cut scaloppine across the grain from the top round.
• Unless you are on a medically prescribed diet, do not shrink from using what salt is necessary to draw out the flavor of food.

Of course I can't afford to use no Parmesan that is not parmigianno-reggiano. It costs $23 a pound, and that’s more than shoes. Still, there's something wonderfully emphatic about the double-negative, no Parmesan that it not. I feel like saluting when I hear that. But I still buy second rate cheese. And yes I usually grate my own, but sometimes I buy the pre-grated in the plastic tub, feeling mildly furtive and ashamed. And as for no Parmesan with olive oil sauces--why not?

My favorite rules describe what I'm already doing anyway. They're like praise without the embarrassment. "Unless you are on a medically prescribed diet, do not shrink from using what salt is necessary to draw out the flavor of food." Three cheers for that advice. And I like the word 'shrink.' People are such cowards about a little salt. They have no idea how much salt is in the store-bought foods they're used to eating, so they get all timid about salting the pasta water, sprinkling in a few useless grains. I salt everything, even hot chocolate (you should try it).

The rule about dressing salads is smart because it encourages simplicity. I used to shake-shake-shake the dressing in a little jar. Or use a whisk and slow-poured olive oil, straining for an emulsion, which always separated. Now my favorite dressing is olive oil, salt and pepper, right on the leaves. Maybe a touch of balsamic or lemon. Maybe.

But I don’t think I’ve got across why Marcella’s so great. Back when I was an English major I thought the perfect paper would be just my favorite parts of the book, typed, with a big Amen at the end. In that spirit, here is what Marcella says in a section called Cooking: A Language

All that really matters in food is its flavor. It matters not that it be novel, that it look picture-pretty, that it be made with unusual or costly or currently fashionable ingredients, that it be served by candlelight, that it display intricacy of execution, that it be invested with the glory of a celebrated name. Such incidentals may add circumstantial interest to the business of eating, but they add nothing to taste and signify nothing when taste is lacking.

Taste is produced by the expressive use of the cuisines that have come down to us. One becomes fluent in a cuisine as in a language: Expression must be vigorous, clear, concise. There can be no unnecessary ingredient or unnecessary step. A dish may indeed be complicated, but in terms of taste every component, every procedure must count.

Do not strain for originality. It ought never to be a goal, but it can be a consequence of your intuitions. [I love that.] If the purpose of flavor is to arouse a special kind of emotions, that flavor must emerge from genuine feelings about the materials you are handling. What you are, you cook.

Do not arbitrarily shuffle the vocabulary of one cuisine with that of another in an attempt to make your cooking “new.” There is no more use for such a hybrid than there is for Esperanto. The cuisines available to us have all the flexibility we can handle with felicity, and more variety than our invention can exhaust.

I am not suggesting that one must cook in pedantic submission to unalterable formulas. I hope the recipes in this book demonstrate that I do not. I am suggesting that the discipline of a cuisine’s syntax, cadence, native idiom can make invention and improvisation eloquent rather than contrived.

My New Year’s Resolution was going to be: Follow recipes. More or Less. Now and Then. Because I think my fault in cooking is a lack of discipline. I’m addicted to improvisation, and I hate measuring. In my life cookbooks are for reading, not for cooking. But, as with all New Year’s Resolutions, there was a reason you weren’t doing that in the first place—you don’t want to!

So instead I will devote myself to Marcella for a year or so, actually cooking the recipes, not slavishly, mind you, but pretty close. And I think I'll start with cauliflower with pinenuts and raisins, page 256. It’s occurring to me only this moment that discipline and disciple are more or less the same word. And since I already worship Marcella, what could be more natural?

But I want to say more about authority. I’m a lawyer, so I run into unearned authority all the time--judges, stuck up on that pedestal, just as foolish as the rest of us and so few of them know it, god help them. And how true authority is instantly recognizable, whatever the subject.

Marcella teaches you not just how to eat but how to live. But mostly how to eat.

Onion Obsession

I’ve been listening to this weight loss self-hypnosis CD that I ordered online. I’m incredibly embarrassed about this in real life but writing is not quite real life, so I don’t mind talking about it here. In real life humiliation is just humiliation. In writing it’s material.

The soothing voice on the CD says I will be amazed to discover that after eating less than half my meal, I am completely satisfied. It says that every time I eat, before I eat, I will ask myself, is this what a healthy person eats to lose weight? And it says to picture a mirror that says: MY FUTURE IN CONTROL, and then see in the mirror an image of myself at my ideal weight, looking happy and fulfilled. And through it all my mind keeps wandering away to things like: butter--don’t forget to buy--sweet or salted?--both--maybe make bread--whole wheat--try with quinoa--raisins too?

The CD says hypnosis can’t make you do anything that you don’t really want to do. And so I’ve concluded that I don’t really want to stop thinking about food all the time. And besides, what else is there?

Which brings me to the Super Bowl. We had hotdog magic, caramelized onion dip, Fritos (the big ones) and potato chips (the wavy ones). Also other assorted dips. The hotdog magic recipe was from one of my grandma’s handwritten recipe cards, a family heirloom in faded pencil. So we buy the hotdogs and cheese and crescent rolls in a tube, and there on the Pillsbury crescent roll package is the same exact recipe. Not much to it: wrap hotdogs and cheese in a crescent roll and bake. The highlight is really when you peal the paper off the crescent roll package and it goes, POP! and the dough starts to ooze out. Enzo liked that part. Of course he wanted to do it again and again, and it’s sort of a one-off thing. He got over the disappointment by beating on his allotted crescent roll dough with some metal tongs. He’s been into tongs lately.

But the true star of the Super bowl is the dip. Enzo and I made the caramelized onions the day before. Slicing five pounds of onions with a sharp knife is not an ideal kitchen chore for a two-year-old, so I prepped them in advance by pealing off the dry outer layers and them cutting into quarters, or even smaller. Then I adjusted my swim goggles to fit Enzo, and let him run the food processor while I fed the onions through that ridiculous little feed tube.

The goggles didn’t work that well, and he and I both started to cry. I explained how onions hurt your eyes, but it would go away, and for the rest of the day he kept rubbing his eyes and saying, “Onion eyes! Onion eyes!” and looking sad and dramatic.

But the onions turned out great: about ten yellow onions, a cube of butter, a sprinkle of brown sugar, salt of course. Cook on low in the slow cooker for about seven hours. Stir it a few times. Oh, and no lid because you have to let all the onion juice cook off. For the first five hours it perfumes the whole house with raw onion, and it seems unlikely that it will ever be anything but raw onion slush. (Come to think of it, maybe Enzo really did have onion eyes all day, and it wasn’t just drama.) But gradually the onions get golden and soft and syrupy.

And here’s the genius part. When the slow cooker is done with whatever time you’ve set it for, it automatically switches to the warm setting. So I accidentally left the onions on warm overnight, and they got darker and sweeter and more fabulous. I think I must have cooked them almost 24 hours total, using the warm setting for most of it, and by the end they were dark chunky brown sludge, like industrial waste, only delicious. We may all die of botulism, but god they were great. And easy. The dip part is—mix caramelized onions with equal parts sour cream and cream cheese.

We had a lot of onions left over, so I keep thinking of more things to eat with caramelized onions. Caramelized onions and hotdogs (obvious but fabulous); caramelized onions, black beans and scrambled eggs; peanut butter and caramelized onion sandwich; and what about risotto?

Also, variations on the onions themselves. Next time I’m going to add some nice hot peppers or maybe fresh ginger to the onions just to add a little kick to that sweetness. Any why not try frozen pearl onions? It would be so easy, and maybe even pretty.

Is this how teenage boys are with sex, thinking about it all the time with endless interest and variation? And what about caramelized onion upside down cake? Hmmmm... .